Camillo Boito’s short story (1883) provided Visconti with the material for his best film and one of the masterpieces of Italian cinema (…) The story of Senso tells of two people submerged in their love, which they themselves see as sad and shameful, and which leads to their reciprocal destruction. Each is for the other both prison and executioner. Their entire affair develops alongside History, in which their inaction, their passivity and a kind of social curse obstruct them from taking part. They are impotent but lucid representatives of a world which ispassing away. In them the positive is dead: this is why it is difficult to respond to their intent of melodrama or opera. Obviously opera is the dominant aesthetic reference which accompanies their trajectory, yet it serves as a requiem whose icy and funereal lyricism does not consent to show the least pity in their regard. Visconti views his characters with cold detachment. He shows them in long undynamic scenes abounding in two-shots, and which place between them and the spectator the maximum distance that the mise en scène allows. On an aesthetic level, the success of the film, (despite the difficulties and the obstacles that Visconti encountered) is close to perfection. The two main actors are unforgettable, and Alida Valli develops with profound coherence the role she played in Piccolo mondo antico and those of Isa Miranda in the era of calligrafismo. The same perfection characterises the film’s intimate scenes and the “pictures of war”. The latter figure among the most beautiful of a genre which the cinema, at that time, hesitated to treat in colour. (…)

Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du cinéma, Laffont, Paris 1992